Ducksboard is joining New Relic | Hacker News Reader

Ducksboard is joining New Relic

ducksboard.com

75 pointseloycoto40 comments

Obligatory Show HN where we first showed Ducksboard to the world (1301 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2332464

Thanks for all the feedback and interest we got from the community through all those years and just because we now work at New Relic doesn't mean we'll stop procrastinating on HN!

congrats, will you still be working from Spain or do you have to relocate?

Thanks!

We're staying in Spain and there are plans to further grow the Barcelona office.

New Relic... isn't that the T-Shirt company that is spamming my Twitter feed?

When I saw the name I immediately thought "that's a clothing company right?"

Never used their product, but I see ads for their shirts all the time.

Dude, I work 2 blocks from their location in Portland. I can't go 10 feet without seeing their t-shirts or hoodies.

Up until a couple months ago, I used to work a couple blocks away. I remember the packs of them roaming the streets.

Congrats guys! Great to see a company from Barcelona getting this success. Inspiration for all Europe.

I was a duckboards customer and a newrelic customer so this is pretty interesting. Congrats to both sides on this acquisition. I hope this breaths new life into ducksboard as it seems they have stagnated quite a bit.

Congrats to the Founders! Though I wonder why New Relic went with Ducksboard rather than other larger competitors like Gecko or Cyfe.

Congrats! Just wanted to take the chance to say 'thank you' for gridster!

Congrats to the ducks team!! They did an amazing job

What it's New Relic???

A company based in San Francisco that offers monitoring of web and mobile applications. I know them because I block their scripts.

I use New Relic. They provide, IMHO, fantastic realtime server monitoring functions. You can tell if the hypervisor is stealing from your allocation, how many resources you are using, and other useful information. All of this is displayed on nice looking graphs and such.

They also give you downtime notifications if your server goes offline for more than a few minutes. Not only is the service free, but they give you a free T-shirt.

They have application monitoring tools as well, which they are monetizing. I'm very happy with the product.

What's Ducksboard?

What's Ducksboard?

Think like the Panic dashboard but reconfigurable with as many data sources as Zapier supports APIs.

Uh, ok, what's Ducksboard, what's Panic dashboard and what's Zapier?

I am not sure if HN is for you. These are well known companies in this sphere and barring that a quick Google search would answer these questions but obviously you are just making a reddit style joke post that also has no place here.

I'm semi-serious. I know NewRelic, as we use it at work and it's good. I don't know those other products, so the "explanation" didn't explain anything to me. Comments HN excel (sometimes) at distilling the merits of using these products in a way that press releases that a google search finds really do not.

I'm sorry if you didn't like the terse and flippant way that I expressed that.

Thanks for the vote of confidence, though. I see that your account is less than a month old (hint: click on the user name and you can see the same about me).

What I don't like about New Relic is their pricing model. I don't like to be paying for each appserver connected.

We are constantly adding and removing servers based on our traffic, and with something like New Relic we need to renegotiate or change contract if we suddenly needs a lot of servers. Pay by metric, pay by request etc. is fairer in my eyes. If I have 10 servers connnected and send 1 request-per-minute I still pay for having 10 servers connected.

If they process 1 request from me it shouldn't matter whether or not I have 1 or 10 servers connected, I should only pay for what they process.

The reason I am not using NewRelic personally is that my infrastructure is 5 linodes, which I pay $20 for each server. And with NewRelic Pro I have to pay $149 per host. I have seen people doing tricks like only enabling NewRelic for certain hosts just to get around their pricing model.

I really like New Relic, and its very pleasant to use their service, they give good insight about your application, I just wish I could afford their service.

Their pricing models make even less sense when you’re using docker containers for deployments.

With that said, I’ve used their services for years and without question for my group the monitoring pays for itself in improved efficiency of developers and operations. Last year we moved from the free service to the enterprise service that gives us 12 app-servers (in our case 12 deployed Rails docker-Containers) for about $500 a month.

We have docker nodes that spin up and down frequently for one of the rails apps we use for monitoring and it can at times create what appears to be more instances than what we physically have.

Their free service I believe is good enough for many use cases, and you can monitor an unlimited number of hosts/services outside of the “application” monitoring. I looked at scout and a few other monitoring services, and as much as I like their pricing model, the product just doesn’t compare to new-relic.

I agree, New Relic's pricing model is almost too "enterprise". Per host pricing seems high, and difficult to scale. It's too bad, because I love everything else they offer. I'm even considering the new Insights service. I think they need to introduce a mid-tier pricing level between Free and Pro.

They've got a good foothold in the market as a all-in-one solution. I've attempted to find a drop-in replacement, without much luck. It's difficult to find a one-for-one service, but here's some similar services with entry-level pricing:

DataDog (https://www.datadoghq.com/pricing/): $15/host/month up to 100 hosts.

Scout (https://scoutapp.com/subscriptions): $10/host/month

CopperEgg (http://copperegg.com/pricing/): A la carte depending on service

Stackify (http://www.stackify.com/pricing/): $15/host/month

The biggest feature that I need is application level monitoring for PHP. There's plenty of great server monitoring tools, but not many services that track application performance like New Relic does.

I know there's plenty of ways to replicate New Relic, but who has the time?

Of course, I could be completely wrong, and missing a great alternative service.

> I agree, New Relic's pricing model is almost too "enterprise".

That was also my conclusion, if you look at the list of companies that uses them you will get a list of some very big businesses. And they can probably afford it, which is good for NewRelic.

> I know there's plenty of ways to replicate New Relic, but who has the time?

You could probably use their software, and build a collector for the data, but that doesn't really solve the issue of not building an alternative service.

Yehuda Katz have built Skylight (https://www.skylight.io/) for Ruby performance metrics and they do charge for the number of requests, the platform isn't there yet, but they are improving a lot. Their newsletters are a good read :-)

> Per host pricing seems high, and difficult to scale.

This is an understatement. $149/month/host is crazy if you're using anything other than the largest AWS instances, for example - a c3.large is $16.11/month with a reservation.

But New Relic isn't necessarily designed to be a tool to save you hosting $ (although I suppose it could). What about as a tool to save engineering hours, and increase conversion rates by reducing error rates and improving performance? Maybe the "worth it" changes then -- especially when you consider that we have a Lite product that's absolutely free for unlimited apps, servers, and request volume -- just limited to 24 hour data retention and missing some of our more advanced/in-depth features.

I work for New Relic, obviously :)

> What about as a tool to save engineering hours, and increase conversion rates by reducing error rates and improving performance?

The problem I have with that argument is that the number of hours New Relic saves me isn't really related to the number of instances I'm running. If I've got 10 AWS medium instances and I swap them out for 30 AWS micro instances, my NR cost just tripled but its utility to me likely didn't.

You just need to talk your account rep (or sales if you don't have one). You will definitely not pay this price. I work for New Relic, so if you need help, let me know.

I really don't like playing "what's the real price" games.

I hear you. It's just a matter of simplicity. We can't have every single environment configuration on the site. So, we have a few list prices with links to contact us if your model doesn't fit. I hope that helps. If you have other questions, let me know.

> Of course, I could be completely wrong, and missing a great alternative service.

AppNeta TraceView is an alternative to New Relic: http://www.appneta.com/products/traceview/

Disclosure: I work for AppNeta.

Getting out of my comfort zone here, as I feel we are not ready, but my company is working on a product that is focusing much more on application profiling than NewRelic and less on the monitoring that is built exclusively for PHP:

https://profiler.qafoolabs.com/

We are still in closed beta but not for long anymore. You can sign up for our waiting list if you are interested to hear more.

As for the pricing, we are working on a model that is not per server/host.

Do you recommend any particular alternative to New Relic? In particular, I'd be interested in something that helps answer the questions "How much memory am I using, and what's using it?" New Relic helps a lot with the latter question, as it can aggregate request time by Rails action. E.g. it can say "30% of your Apache workers' time is spent in this one Rails action." Which helps you understand what's driving the need for more Apache workers, and thus the need for more memory.

Try https://ruxit.com, we are fresh out of beta (disclosure: I work on ruxit)

Supported technologies: https://ruxit.com/ruxit/supportedtechnologies.html

We have pretty cool technology to correlate events into bigger buckets (problems).It is based on tracking of each individual transaction flow through the stack plus discovery of infrastructure topology and performance.

[Edit:spelling ]

You probably just didn't talk to anyone. You will pay much less than that if you go with a bursting plan.

If you write into support at New Relic (or email/call a sales rep that you have already worked with), we can get an account exec to chat with you about pricing more appropriate to your situation. We are aware that in a world of autoscaling and micropriced micronodes, a different pricing model is likely to be more appropriate.

You can see the first shot at a revision like this with the pricing restructure on heroku that we announced last december:

http://blog.newrelic.com/2013/12/04/new-relic-announces-new-...

Your complaint is totally reasonable and NR is hoping to address it soon!

https://www.google.com/search?q=new+relic

Well, just today I was asked can we do something about our New Relic bill. I mean, come one, $160/server is too much and the annual contract keeps you locked in. We should build an open-source APM and press those guys to stop ganging up togehter with AppDynamics, AppNeta, and the likes and keep the price high.

I'm sure I got downvoted from one of the APM providers - a sane developer without vested interest will never do that. So, thank you for showing your true colors, vendors!

So, I didn't downvote you, and I work at AppNeta. In fact, I spent a lot of time arguing for us to switch from a per-request pricing model to a per-host model. Reasons we did it:

1) Per-request is unpredictable. Paying 2x because you got a traffic spike and had to auto-scale sucks. Paying 10x because you got a traffic spike and handled it without autoscaling sucks more. Getting capped at day 20 in the month because we didn't want variable pricing sucks the most.

2) Estimating cost is nigh-on impossible. If we charge per metric, quick, what will it cost per month?

3) The price we picked per host is, to some extent, based on the amount of data we collect and store. We store every traced request for 90 days, and do analysis on all of that as it comes it. The AWS bill to pay for all that analysis and storage isn't trivial.

The dinosaurs of the early 2000s got around this by saying "just pay for the license, and store it yourself!" And you ended up with customers that had 2 hours of data retention, because storing it all was expensive.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is, we're in a different league of data collection than something like Pingdom. There are serious costs associated with all that -- we're not colluding to screw you, we promise :)

Edit: Check out Twitter Zipkin and Etsy CrossStitch if you want open-source. The basic collection tech exists, but it's a pain to run yourself. At least, that's what we hear from customers.

Per-host is also not well-suited for elastic computing. Pricing should be billed for host-hours instead, if you ask me. I'm familiar with zipkin, but it's an overkill for most projects; Etsy CrossStitch - although I follow Etsy's projects, I don't think I've seen it. Anyway, I think I've exchanges comments with you before in here, but the issue is that you guys have some large enterprise clients, and usually with companies like yours, pricing totally gets shifted towards that model. It's really too expensive to pay more for monitoring (although I greatly value the data), when it exceeds the cost of the server itself. At least, business people can hardly justify something with clear costs like hardware (cloud or not) to something without 100% clear benefit to them (as they don't use it; it's for the developers, who's job should be to write code that just works and doesn't require all these expensive babysitting tools, if you see my point). This is not to attack you or anything, but my experiences across multiple organizations. Worst case (at least with your competitor New Relic) is that you pay for internal dev servers as well. Come on, give me a break - how can you compare live with dev servers, really? This is the abuse that I'm talking about. Maybe it's a different situation with you, I don't know, but it's really unfair and a frustration for us.

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